


Winter's Sorrow

by BlackForestt



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-18
Updated: 2014-10-18
Packaged: 2018-02-21 14:24:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2471444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackForestt/pseuds/BlackForestt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oneshot. His little bird is lost to him; and he will join her however he can, whatever it takes. Rated M for coarse language and dark themes. Read notes for more info.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Winter's Sorrow

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Okay everyone, I'm really sorry for posting this. It's a sad fic, and sad fics ain't popular for a reason. But I'd like to say I published this for my own personal reasons - I wrote it during a particularly testing part of my life and to publish it means I can get closure and close that chapter now. Not really expecting any rave reviews on this, it's more for my own personal benefit.  
> 2\. I'm one of those horrible authors that takes out my predicaments on the characters in my stories. Also, I'm not treating this as a proper fic, it's more like an outpouring of what I was feeling at the time. So yeah.  
> 3\. A HUGE thank you to the wonderful jillypups for beta-ing this for me - I promise you'll have more cheerful pieces to work on soon!!

He was cold, deathly cold, and the whiteness of the snow whirling around him blinded him. Snowflakes, white-hot with icy pain, melted on the bare skin of his face. His hair lay flat against his skull, plastered to his forehead in a heavy, sodding wet curtain that dripped sadly down his back.

She had been so small in death. In life she had been tall, taller than nearly every woman he had chanced upon, taller than any woman he'd spent himself inside, taller than any women who had poured his wine out for him. But she had been _different;_ she had dragged out of him a reluctant devotion, some strange fire he didn’t know he possessed. And the moment that slender chest of hers stopped rising and falling and the heart within stopped beating, death had pissed on that fire. He was nothing now that she had left, and it was due to every remaining shred of sanity he possessed that he had lasted this long.

His knees gave out and suddenly he was staring up into the white sky. He scarcely felt his back crunch as it hit the hard compacted snow with a dull thump. _A broken back would do no good. A snapped spine wouldn't kill me, and death is what I want. Death is what I need, damn me._

The black hollows of his eyes stung with the tears that would not come. Like the healing of a bruise, in which blood surged in quick pulses and slower intervals, Sandor Clegane willed himself to die.

He lay there in the blinding snow, staring with glassy eyes at the cloudy vault stretching above his despondent body, listening to the dull throb of his heart against his empty chest. Each throb drew him closer to his own death, and each throb ripped him away from her still, she who laid cold and dead in their summer glade; she who had brought his soul with her down into that cold, hard earth.

He was broken, bleeding, his very self was crumbling into ash. Days had turned into weeks, weeks had turned into moons. More than six moons had passed since he and a wandering priest had buried her in that sunny glade she had loved. Six moons had passed, and he had died a little more each day. The liquor had been drunk, the china smashed, and he now slept in the spare bedroom, into which he had succumbed after days without sleep. How could he? And now there was nothing left to save him, to save him from what had been threatening to happen since his entire world was set afire at the age of six.

_She's dead. And damn me, I died along with her. Come back to me, little bird. I didn't wed you to be left on my own._

It was cold, and still he lay there. The wind howled and bit his numb, raw flesh, but every white-hot tooth that ripped into his senseless cheeks brought him a little closer to where he wanted to be, where he had always wanted to be before she had danced into his dark domain and lit it with bright copper rays. He had flirted with the Reaper more times than he could count, and in finding happiness in his little bird was he really fucked up the arse by Death; by dragging beautiful, innocent Sansa away from his burned grasp and into another world, another world below where he now lay. He saw her in that distant place, but the veil of living and dead separated them. _Now all I have is my fucking face to keep me company._

He had screamed for death when his face had melted into the brazier. He had wished for a quiet, painless death as he had drowned in countless brooding, drunken stupors. His leg had been ripped open by some gutless whoreson years ago and he had begged that little wolf bitch for death, sweet quiet merciful death. His dance with darkness had ceased, had turned into an orbit around some other poor tortured soul while he had lost himself in his little bird, but he knew this reel once more. His life had turned full circle, and all he wanted was peace.

_If there were any Gods, they would give me the gift of mercy. Seven know I've bloody outstayed my welcome._

Ice kissed his brow; and the dim rushing wind that screamed in his ears carried the faintest notes of bird song, of beautiful clear birdsong that smelled and tasted of summer and red hair and sweat on joined flesh. The notes rang pure and sweet and slicked the snow from his frozen lips; and then he knew he was lost from the world.

_"You know where the heart is?"_ He had asked that question all those years ago. Would that he was the same dying soldier he had given mercy to now.

_Kill me. But I've no heart left to stab. Tear off my face instead, and mayhap I'll have a new face in time to meet my little bird._ He moaned into the icy air. _She deserved more than a disfigured dog. She deserved more than me._

He lay there and the wind screamed its sorrow. The summer flowers had long since died, the summer birds had retreated to the south. Nothing remained but snow and ice and death, the death of his little bird and the death of his soul, his life, his self along with her.

_I had her and now she's gone. Gone, and left me in this fucking mess. She was all I ever wanted, damn her, and now she's gone._

The birds in his head sang, and his ruined mouth twisted upwards. The birds in his head sang, and he welcomed them, welcoming the snow that raked his frozen skin with icy claws. He lay there in the snow, and it twirled around him almost lovingly, embracing him in its icy apathy. He watched it fall onto his chest, felt it soak through his clothes. And still he lay there, broken.

The birds sang in his head, and the wind roared. He lay there, and the world was white. White, bloody _white,_ kingsguard white. _I wore a white cloak once._ And he laughed, madly laughed his harsh, cracked mirth into the white world. _I wore white, but I was black inside._

Ice kissed his lips, and yet they were warm, warm with the ghost of her mouth on his. She had burned him, that sweet girlish little bird, she had burned him with those red lips of hers. His mouth still tingled from where she had swept her pointed little tongue along the glide of his lips, all those times he had taken her in the snug darkness of their little bedchamber. She had been shy at first, trembling as he had gripped her and stroked her and melted into her until they were as one. Her delicate frame had seemed constantly threatened by his sheer brutish physicality; his vast expanse of sinew and muscle was a world away from her fragile wrists and slender neck, and he had held her as if she were crafted from spun glass.

_But she was never a little bird, not truly. A she-wolf lay hidden in those bloody feathers of hers._ He could recall her moans as clearly as he felt the hollowness in his chest slowly consume him, starting with his heart and lungs and stomach, eating away until he was nothing but an empty shell, a ruin of a man. Flames of grief scorched his insides into charred nothingness; and he welcomed them, blessed flames, welcomed them for drawing him slowly to that land where his little bird now sang.

_Tonight is the longest night. I'd go through fire and back again if it meant I could have back what I wanted._ And what he wanted was _her,_ gods, only her. But death? Death seemed a welcome prospect, too. _And I'm sure the Seven Kingdoms will mourn my passing._

His life was laughable, such a sick abject failure from the moment flames had fed on his screaming face. Consistently torn away from the life he could have had and the man he could have been, his one happiness - _her_ \- had taken root somewhere in that heavy black soul of his and bloomed. And now - _and now_ \- that flower had been ripped out of his body along with his heart and his guts and his thrice-damned fucking _soul,_ leaving him broken and empty. The ghost of who he could have been had breathed life into him while she lived, reanimated his dark outlook with enough light to feel, touch, _taste_ life. And now she had been taken from him, and he was nothing, just a few broken shards of a man that once was - not that he had been whole to start with. Broken, disturbed, fucked up - that was him. And losing what had momentarily healed him drove him even deeper into his own darkness - into a place where not even he could drag himself out of.

_Sansa..._

Dimly the white world blackened around his still form, until the snow fell in dark grey flakes that danced in the harsh pitiless glow of the moonlight. An owl hooted softly from some unseen perch, but it fell deaf to his ears. He heard only the song of summer birds, summer birds with copper plumage; the tears flowed freely and froze on his face.

The song never wavered, and still he cried until he was drawing great heaving breaths that sawed though his numb chest. The snow fell sadly around him, on him, over him. The moon looked on with a frown, through a sliver of parted clouds.

Was there an afterlife? He hadn't thought about it before, never considered its importance. If he died, would he see her again? Would he feel her lips on his scarred skin once more? _No doubt I'll be sent straight down to the Seven Hells. And it's no hair off my arse, as long as she's down there with me._

And still the snow fell, and still he lay there; winter's child. And yet the birds in his head sang as freely as if the ice freezing on his face were summer sunlight, as freely as his own bird had sang his name when he had kissed her, held her, joined with her and made her his. _And I was hers. Gods, I was hers._

The tears pooled in his ears, his hair; they burned his face, and for the first time in his life he relished their blazing touch. He let them fall, wretched burning tears, let them fall as his soul's bitterness leaked from his dark eyes, as his heart twisted cruelly in that seemingly indomitable chest of his. He sobbed into the harsh black air, and all the while the birds sang.

_"Sansa!"_

His cry ripped out of his throat involuntarily; and in that moment his entire world had come crashing around him. He was aware, so acutely aware of the grief that tormented him into near-madness, the agony of loss that made him want to cut his own throat _right here, right now,_ cut out his dead heart and toss it into the fire where it belonged, make a pact with the Stranger in exchange for his little bird. _I would do anything for her. Gods hear me say it, I cared for her. I loved her, damn me, loved her as I would never love another. And they said the Hound was never capable of such things. He wasn't. But Sandor was._

The wind screamed, and the trees standing in their silent sigil mourned him. Their dark skeletons were solitary; no bird graced their naked boughs. The night deepened, but he was too lost to see.

_Come back to me, little bird. Come back to me and make me a man again._

But that little bird never would return to him; with a chirp and a flash of autumnal feathers, she had flown to some distant evergreen tree, a tree he would never climb while he still lived and breathed in this life, in this life gripped by winter.

_Come back to me._ His throat ached from sobbing, and his eyes were raw. _Don't leave me to be who I was. Don't leave me, little bird._

A flash of copper in the sun, milky white planes of smooth skin... her laugh, and gods, her _taste..._

_Damn you, damn you, damn you into the seven burning hells. Why did you leave me, girl, when I couldn't live with myself? Did you think I'd cope without you chirping sweet nothings in my ear? Without my pretty little bird to keep me sane in this sad fucking jape of a lifetime?_

She had been cold to touch, and her lips were bleeding, a scarlet slash in a field of cotton...

_Come back to me, little bird._

He closed his eyes, and all he saw was a pair of forget-me-not eyes, wide and blue and beautiful. _She_ was _beautiful._

He lay there in the cold, wet snow, listening to the birds that weren't there.

_Come back to me..._


End file.
